My publication - the SPARC Product Directory
played a role in accelerating the growth of the SPARC (Scalable Processor
ARChitecture) systems market in the 1990s by helping users, VARs and oems easily
find compatible products and suppliers from hundreds of SPARC compatible oems.

I'd like to thank everyone (including all the readers, contributors,
vendors, customers and other Sun-SPARC-Solaris publishers and ORGs in the
market - including thousands of key people inside Sun Microsystems itself) who
helped make this independently funded publication possible during an
exciting period in the computer market.

From around 2003 onwards - a
period which I later called "the modern era of SSDs" the torch for
igniting momentous changes in data driven architectures moved onto the
SSD and memoryfication market.

As the creator and original publisher
of
StorageSearch.com I was in the
lucky position with the help of my readers and contributors of being a
memorist for the market and evangelist for speeding up its adoption from 1998 to
2018.

In 1996 the 5th annual edition of the SPARC Product Directory
(shown above - with an ad by Antares Microsystems on the front cover) began life
as a printed book - but by the middle of 1996 it also had a parallel life on
the web. The web gave us access to a much larger readership - which peaked at
hundreds of thousands of unique SPARC readers a year. That seemed huge to me at
that time - but by 2000 it had been overtaken by our new OS agnostic guide -
called StorageSearch.com

The picture below shows you the first page of
the contents page from the same 1996 edition - with a facing ad by Force
Computers.

.....

Below you can see a an example
of the SPARC Product Directory's home page in about December 1998. In those
days the web pages for optimised for the Netscape browser and very large
screens. ("Optimised" well enough to attract over 40,000 unique
readers / month at that time anyway.)

SPARC®
is a registered trademark of
SPARC International,
Inc. SPARC Product Directory
SM is a service mark of SPARC International,
Inc used under license by
ACSL. Products
using the SPARC trademarks are based on an architecture developed by
Sun Microsystems, Inc.